Boubakar S. Fofana, mathematics teacher, Canarsie High School

February 15, 2002

Dr. Joel Shapiro, Principal , Canarsie High School

Dear Dr. Shapiro,

On February 7, 2002, you informed me, in a meeting attended by Mr. Paul Millstein, UFT Chapter Leader, that, on 1/15/02, I pushed a student, T.N., in my fourth period class ; you provided me thereby an explanation, at last, as to why I was put on assignment duty since 1/17/02. You then asked me for my version of the incident. I told you that I never pushed this student and did not even recall any particular incident with him other than his disruptive behavior prompting me to remove him from class a couple of times. I also mentioned that he cursed at me gratuitously in the hallway on the first day of this semester (1/30/02) in front of a witness, H. C., one of my students, but that I ignored him.

The meeting ended with the understanding that I would write a statement based on my best recollection.The alleged incident took place on 1/15/02 , and you informed me three weeks later. Since you label it as « corporal punishment » (stigmatizing people seems to be your favorite sport), you violated the Chancellor's Regulation by notifying me and the Office of Investigation weeks later, instead of 3 days.

After the meeting, I went immediately to Mr. Balasiano, AP, math supervisor, and asked him for the teacher's carbon copy of a referral I wrote on T.N. on 1/17/02. He obliged.(Exhibit 1 ). It helped me remember why I gave it to him instead of the dean, as it should be normally :

On the 1/15, I called security to remove T.N. from classroom and sent him to Room 138 (disruptive students holding room) with a quick note . Shortly after, T.N. came back with Mr. Balasiano who asked me whether I pushed the student. I replied No. The issue was displaced from student disrupting instruction to teacher pushing student : clearly he managed to turn the table on me. When the same student misbehaved again on the 1/17, I chose to send the referral, not to the dean, but to Mr. Balasiano to make a statement. What action did he take ? He wrote, under Action Taken By Person Receiving Referral, "Student sent for. Absent". There was no follow-up on his part. He gave me the carbon copy and suggested that we meet with T.N. the next day (2/8) to address the issue, i.e. three weeks after the write-up ! Since my accuser happened to be my 1/30 harrasser, I wrote him up for the verbal abuse I initially ignored as I said before, and gave the new referral to Mr. Balasiano (Exhibit 2).

On 2/8/02, at around 10:45, H.C. and T.N. were sent to the math department accompanied by a dean, Ms. Demarino.H. confirmed the 1/30 incident and left. When asked about the 1/17 incident, T.N. said repeatedly "you pushed me…you pushed me", a reference to the wrong incident (1/15). Mr. Balasiano asked him whether her mother came to school. He said no : "I wrote a statement and the principal called her", he said. The exchange was particularly informative to me since I was deliberately kept in the dark. So, you took a particular interest in the alleged incident because Fofana is involved, and contacted the student's parent yourself; and yet, countless unsubstantiated accusations of the kind are handled by the deans ; some students claim all the time : « Mr. X pushed me ; Mr. Y said he would f… me up : etc… ». When asked about the incident described earlier by H., T.N. said he has nothing to say.

T.N. recurrent disruptive behavior is legendary among teachers :

I wrote him up on 12/11/01(Exhibit 3) : "T.N. ruined my class by using a farting noise device.(Double period). Contemptuous of rules, he walked up to Mariam (attendance office) for her "appreciation" of the noise : right under my nose. She told me that T.N. used the same device in the lab class (room 318) earlier. A similar incident took place yesterday, but I was not able to locate the source of noise. (James Bart has a similar device).

Students like these two would crack jokes, delighted :" it stinks in here, open the windows !"

On 12/4/01, in the same literacy class they covered my desk with spit, thick spit, throwing my belongings to the floor. . I called for Mr. Balasiano, Ms. Davis, and Ms. Cody, guidance counselor, to bear witness. A book of mine and half of a set of calculators were stolen in the process. Instead of acknowledging the problem and address it (anything else would short change the children) you chose to interpret such incidents as class management problems !

The perpetrators were apparently unhappy with their marking period grades. That T.N. turned to Mr. Balasiano during the meeting I mentioned earlier, and asked :"When are you gonna change my 40 ?"is revealing. The same student copies other people's homeworks and passes them as his. (Exhibit 4). It is a case of the tail waggling the dog : I cannot count the number of times this young man called me faggot . Ms. Cody talked to him many times, to no avail.

The following background will put this corporal-punishment masquerade into perspective and shed light on your own manipulative, stealthy effort to railroad a teacher you barely know. This is not about T.N., but you.

By the end of October you wrote an avalanche of letters, inaccurate and full of inuendos, and placed them in my file. I could see the writing on the wall : they were planted for future use, that is to build a "record". I will place a rebuttal for each in my file.

1. On Monday, October 1, 2001, at your request, I met with you to discuss "students complaints about you". Mr. Balasiano, AP, math supervisor, and Mr. Millstein, UFT chapter leader took part in the meeting. Following the conference you put a letter, dated 10/08/01, into my file, suggesting a wrongdoing without spelling it out, leaving out , of course, the inflammatory statements you made during the meeting. Since the charges were vague - you did not elaborate on the circumstances in which my alleged misconduct took place , and much less on the identities of the complainants - I asked you for specifics. Staring at me, raising your voice : "You want specifics ? You called a student 'fucking nigger'… " I found that repulsive : a slimy, cowardly way to deliver a racial slur through the back door. Pathetic, quite beneath your function. I probably disappointed you : I did not react, certainly not noisily.

You did not stop at that : "it has to do with your culture... they say they don't understand you…" and so on and so forth. What do you know about my culture ?! "Black culture" ? Close-mindedness and inculture cloud your judgement, I am afraid. Degrading people is your forte. At the end of your first year as principal, more than hundred teachers besieged your office (end January 2000) , with dozens storming in, banging on desks, doors , walls, etc., demanding that you receive their elected leader and apologize to him for your contemptuous, offensive attitude and language during a faculty meeting -- a memorable uprising that should have made you wiser. The weirdiest "specific" was yet to come : "Also, one of your students was crying the other day…" you said.I asked : " What did I do to cause her to cry ?" Mr. Balasiano, who brought up the accusation, was incapable to articulate a meaningful answer. Dumdfound, Mr. Millstein tried unsuccessfully to elicit some coherent explanation. "One of your students was crying"! To rescue your assistant you silenced me because I was asking sharp questions hard to evade : "What did the student say herself ?" Probably embarrassed, Mr. Balasiano [1] left the room. It was degrading. I felt violated.

I investigated the incident discreetly and understood exactly what happened. As a result I wrote a letter to Ms. Paulette Dollinger, guidance counselor, the source of this indignity. I wrote, in part :

Dear Ms. Dollinger,

On Wednesday 9/26/01, you and Mr. Balasiano, Assistant Principal, math supervisor, came in my classroom at the end of the 8 th period (around 2:30) , accompanied by a student, Erica Cruz. Apparently Erica was crying and you asked me what happened. My explanation was straightforward : I was about to write her up for hurling a vicious racial slur at me. She probably told you a different story - you did not evoke it - and you felt the need for calling my supervisor in. Erica was transferred out of my class on Friday (Thursday was a holiday).

This student was listed on the M$AM-09 roster since 9/03/01 but never showed up until that day. Fifteen minutes before the end of the period, she asked me whether I marked her absent ; I replied “No”; I hadn't even taken the attendance yet. Not convinced, she walked up to my desk, bent forward to read the roster, and screamed : “Fucking nigger! You marked me absent !”Apparently, she mistakenly confused her previous absence (bubbled in) with that of 9/26.

Erica, who is a white Hispanic, denied it “ I did not ; people call me nigger all the time.” You and Mr. Balasiano left the room without uttering a word, indicating, in effect, that this student racial bigotry was OK, not worth further investigation. I concluded that you simply displayed your own racial animosity by proxy. Since you, Ms. Dollinger, did not know me, and never interact with me prior to the incident, your behavior cannot be explained otherwise. Your knowledge of Erica as a chronic truant since last year -- something I found out in a conversation with Mr. Perez ( attendance office)-- reinforced my interpretation. Further, a phone conversation with her mother (Ms. Noreen) revealed how conniving you could be : as you admitted subsequently, you left the following message on her answering machine : “ there was an incident at school, and we took care of it.” Really ? How did you take care of it ? Ms. Noreen was taken aback, she said, because it was all meaningless to her. She turned to Erica and her explanation was illuminating : a teacher accused her of calling him nigger when actually another student did it.

Ms. Noreen apologized and told me that Erica did not learn “that” from her ; that her daughter was a truant since last year ; that she threatened to send her back to her father - who is living in the Bronx - unless she changed her behavior and attended school : frightening prospect because Erica does not get along with her stepmother, Ms. Noreen said (…)

You asked me why I wrote the above letter weeks later after the incident. I wrote it for two reasons : a) your attempt to use the incident to smear me, and brand me as a “child abuser” ; b) Ms. Dollinger would not discuss the matter in a professional manner when I approached her, in front of a witness (Devorak Shabtai, math teacher) : "I don't wanna hear it ! I don't wanna hear it !" she said and walked away.

2. On 11/11/01 you convened a meeting with Dr. Ellen Panzer (Board of Ed Equal Opportunity liaison at Canarsie HS) to discuss the above letter,which "violates the Chancellor's Regulations on Discrimination/Harassment" because, in the last paragraph, I suggested to Ms Dollinger that she transfer out to a lilly-white school if she could not live with Canarsie HS's diversity. You asked me to apologize to Ms. Dollinger. I asked you to apologize to me for your own bigoted statements. Disconcerted, you embarked in a lamentable sophistry -- " I did not say 'it has to do with your culture'. I said 'It might be'." -- , trying to extricate yourself from a situation of your own making, claiming that you had been working for 34 years in the system, got along with minorities, and even obtained an award from the NAACP ! A consolation, I guess, for me or Ms. Cody (you belittle her publicly) [2] or Ms. Seaman (the security guard you put down noisily in the hallway shortly before Chrismas holiday) or others. Why NAACP ? Instead of addressing a real issue with a real individual, you reduced me to a category, a generic individual : the same way the Europeans, not long ago, did to the Jews. Although I am offended, I won't attribute your insensitivity to your "culture" whatever it might be. By the way, since I violated the Chancellor's regulation on discrimination/harassment, why would you drop the matter ? I did not hear from his office. You are not known for being charitable : evidently, the prospect of having to explain yourself on your own statements held you back.

3. "They say they don't understand you", what do you think ? You observed my lesson on 11/16/01, in tandem with Mr. Balasiano : reluctanly you found it satisfactory because your AP was quite praiseful. The previous observation (with Mr. Balasiano) was satisfactory.There are six different accents among teachers in the math department alone, with varying command of English : American, Jamaican, Haitian, Russian, Phillipino, and African. The student body itself is made up of a mosaic of cultures and languages. Did "they" tell you having problem understanding some of these teachers as well? Which accent is acceptable to you ? Is Paul Jocelyn‘s fine, for instance ? [3] Evidently, this accent business is a tool for you to intimidate foreign-born teachers. Hardly new :

In 1937, Albert Smallheiser, president of the Teachers Guild, challenged the Board of Examiners for capricious practices such as disqualifying candidates with a foreign accent for having "speech defects."Even as late as 1950, "people who had foreign accents could forget it," said Carrubba [a UFT member]. "Even a distinct Brooklyn or Bronx accent was looked down on. (…)

For Eastern European Jews and other immigrants, on the other hand, getting a job meant long hours learning how to break the board's sound barrier. In anticipation of the dreaded oral interview, many a would-be teacher took the mandatory speech course at City College and fretted over how to avoid the dead giveaways. Source : History of the UFT.

Yes, Jews went through the same indignities as well.

4. A couple of days after the "discrimination/harassment" conference you sent out a memo : "Steven Mitchell, Director of the Board of Education Office of Equal Opportunities will be visiting our school on Wednesday, November 21, 2001. Please come to my office, Room 105, period 5 so you may share concerns you have. We need your input." Strangely, you invited a selected staff members, including me. Then, on second thought you issued another memo inviting everybody ! If what motivated the conference was not clear to most participants, it was limpid to me. I did not attend : I was absent that day.

Dr. Shapiro, teachers are not your subjects; the school staff are not your subjects. We are your collaborators in a common endeavor : teaching and preparing thousands of children for better lives and productive citizenship under your leadership. Regrettably, you display little ; you are more interested in covering your own back, and in bullying segments of the staff. The most honorable thing for you to do is to resign, and give the children a chance.

Sincerely,

Boubakar S. Fofana